Friday, July 27, 2012

The Updated "Manson File"

Charlie up front in the McNeil Island prison band
I have finally started reading the updated version of "The Manson File."

Thanks Grump and thanks Patty!

I can not possibly type up the entire 988 pages. I decided to share some of the things I found bizarre in the book periodically. I say periodically because my other job, the paying one, takes up most of my time lately. I was thinking, remember when The Colonel had his minions type up the entire Paul Watkins book? Maybe he can send those minions my way to take over the typing.

Right now I am up to page 41.  

According to this book, Alvin "Creepy" Karpis took Charlie under his wing in a Washington State prison where they both served time.  Karpis sent a letter to his buddy Frankie Carbo most likely to ask Carbo to keep a look out for Charlie since he was going to be transferred to McNeil Island where Carbo was already serving time. Carbo was a member of the Genovese crime family.

"Less well-known to this day are Carbo's business dealings with a then obscure Los Angeles syndicate player and hopelessly indebted gambling addict named Leno LaBianca.  Among other things, LaBianca was the director of a decidedly shady enterprise known as The First Bank of Hollywood.  The Los Angles Department didn't beat around the bush when they described Mr. LaBianca's financial institution as a "front for hoodlum money."

Eviliz has never read that any where, has anyone else?

"Very early on, the perennial links between American show biz and the underworld left their greasy finger prints all over this case.  That these tell-tale traces have been overlooked in the years since La Bianca's much publicized but still mysterious demise is no accident."

"To begin to get some sense of the previously hidden level that's been obscured under more familiar accounts, a quick game of six degrees of separation may prove an illuminating digression.  For other Carbo connections to coming events in our parolee's (Charlie) life also unfolded around that same time.  For example, it was thanks to Carbo's drastic removal of Bugsy Siegel from his post as the East Coast syndicate's movie industry overseer that a Mafia lawyer named Sidney Korshak moved into the power vacuum opened up by Bugsy's death.  Shortly before our convict's (Charlie again) release from Terminal Island, it was consiglere Korshak- a power-broker so potent he was known by friends and enemies alike as "The Myth"- who pulled strings to see that Robert Evans, a young actor since proven to have maintained close mob connections throughout his career took over Paramount Studios. 

That dream factory's glossy product had not infrequently been funded with mob blood money.  Evans, in turn, helped establish the career of a gifted Polish exile director named Roman Polanski.  Robert Evans produced Polanski's first Hollywood hit, Rosemary's baby. Probably unknown to Polanski, that film was financed with funds, some have surmised, procured from sources directly connected to the Genovese Family activities then taking place in New York. We will come to examine how these mammoth criminal enterprises later collided and intertwined with our subjects (Charlie) considerably more modest outlaw operation."

So begins the Charlie/Mob/Hollywood/LaBianca connection.

Little known fact, Eviliz went to Catholic high school in CT with two girls from the Genovese clan. I remember when we were about 15, someone late at night threw a molotov cocktail into the attic window of their brick home causing the roof and attic along with their bushes and front lawn to burn quickly. Any doubts we had in school as to if they were really mafia were quickly erased.

Evilz also had beef with one of those Genovese girls, the one in a grade ahead of me. She always made it clear on daily basis she wanted to kick my ass because I got to date the few boys in our school and she didn't. I don't think the boys would not date her because she was Mafia. I know it was because she was fat and ugly with a blonde afro.

Stay tuned for more.

Eviliz circa 1983